From: Mat Schaffer <schapht@...>
Date: 2007-01-03T13:50:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Who's maintaining log4r?


On Jan 2, 2007, at 11:34 PM, Tom Copeland wrote:

> On Wed, 2007-01-03 at 02:33 +0900, Tim Pease wrote:
>> I, too, have tried contacting Leon but with no luck :(
>>
>> This does raise the issue of what to do with abandoned projects on
>> RubyForge -- especially ones like Log4r that are widely used.  The
>> best situation would be one where the author could be contacted and
>> project ownership transferred.
>
> Right on.
>
>> Lacking that, should we have some
>> probate process where an abandoned project can be transferred after
>> the current own fails to respond for some period of time?
>>
>> Any thoughts out there on this one?  RubyForge Team?
>
> I'd say if you can't contact the maintainer, then after a reasonable
> amount of time just fork it.  We'd certainly approve a log4r2, or
> something like that.
>
> But I really, really don't like to pull a project out from under an
> admin, even if the project is popular and that admin seems to have
> disappeared.

It's definitely a shame to pull a project completely out from under  
someone, but I think it'd be reasonable just to forcibly add another  
user to the list of commiters.  Unless of course the license stated  
anything against it.  The original copyrights would have to be  
maintained and the original admin would still have access and write  
permissions and could step in if they saw fit.

I'd worry about something like log4r2.  PHP has a lot of that '2'  
mess and it leads to big headaches when upgrading.  Like the recent  
change from DB to MDB2, or PHPUnit2 (class prefix: PHPUnit2) to  
PHPUnit3 (class prefix: PHPUnit, which now conflicts with the defunct  
original phpunit).

If anything just come up with a different name and drop the number.   
Lest we end up with a versioning nightmare of J2SE proportions.

-Mat